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Martin Luther King Jr.'s brother had own, lesser role in movement

Enlarge ImageRequest to buy this photoDon Hogan Charles | The New York TimesThe Rev. A.D. King holds the hands of his brother’s two daughters as they walk in the funeral procession of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. With them is the slain civil-rights leader’s widow, Coretta Scott King, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy and the Kings’ two sons, in Atlanta on April 9, 1968.

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ATLANTA — On July 20, 1969, 15 months after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, his younger
brother, A.D., sat agitated in his Atlanta home.

“They killed my brother. I’m gonna find out who did it,” he told someone on the phone.

A.D., who had been with Martin when he was cut down in Memphis, Tenn., was still distraught. “He
never recovered, because he felt it was his duty to protect his brother,” A.D.’s widow, Naomi King,
recalls.

Martin died a martyr. A.D., who had labored in the background of the civil-rights movement,
would die as a footnote.

His body was discovered the morning after that anguished phone call on the bottom of the family’s
swimming pool.

Even his death was obscured by other events. As his body was being taken to the morgue, Neil
Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were walking on the moon.

“How can you be forgotten if you never been known?” Naomi King asks.

Rebel

Like the Kennedys, the King family has been stalked by tragedy — Alfred Daniel Williams King and
his offspring no less so than his heroic elder brother, whose life and legacy the nation celebrates
today.

Born on July 30, 1930, A.D. was the youngest of the three King children, behind Christine and
Martin, who was named for their father, Martin Sr., known as Daddy King.

Of the children, A.D. was the most rebellious. Instead of going to college and entering the
ministry, he got married as a teenager and tried to raise a family.

Naomi was 13 when she met A.D. King at a YWCA dance in Atlanta.

“He was very lovable and outgoing, and he had a wonderful personality,” she said.

She enrolled at Spelman College in Atlanta in 1949. But she had to drop out during her first
year. Spelman, a historically black school for women, had a rule against pregnant students.

A.D. and Naomi married in June 1950, and Alveda, the King family’s first grandchild, was born in
1951.

As A.D. worked a string of jobs, his family settled into the old King family home in Atlanta.
Four more children — Alfred, Derek, Esther and Vernon — followed.

Preacher

In the mid-1950s, A.D. enrolled in Morehouse College, a historically black all-male school in
Atlanta. He graduated in 1959 and decided to follow his father and brother into the ministry,
assisting Daddy King at Ebenezer Baptist Church.

“A.D. King, if it hadn’t been for Martin and Daddy King, would have been a prominent preacher in
this city, because he was very good,” King loyalist Andrew Young said.

In 1961, A.D. took over as pastor of First Baptist Church of Ensley in Birmingham, Ala. He was
arrested several times.

“He proved to himself that while he might not be his brother, he had his own commitment to the
movement,” King biographer Clayborne Carson said. “That was the first time he became his own
man."

But a man very much in his brother’s orbit, nevertheless.

“His strategy was to support his brother,” said the Rev. Willie Bolden, a longtime friend and
civil-rights soldier. “He never tried to usurp any of the limelight. Many people didn’t even know
Martin Luther King had a brother.”

Target

On May 11, 1963, A.D. and his family felt the full force of the hatred that roiled the city
nicknamed “Bombingham.”

“It was Saturday night before Mother’s Day, and I had just decorated the table,” said Naomi
King. “I was just sitting there ... when I noticed my picture window had a crack in it.”

At that moment, A.D. entered. Experience told them something was wrong. “He said, ‘Let’s get out
of here. It is too quiet,’” Naomi King said. “By the time we got to the middle of our home, the
second bomb went off, and the whole front of the house collapsed. It was just plain hatred.”

A.D. King moved to Kentucky in 1965 to pastor Zion Baptist Church in Louisville, where he fought
for fair housing. On occasion, he would travel with his brother, and he was with Martin in Memphis
on April 4, 1968.

Mourner

A.D. was in his room beneath his brother’s at the Lorraine Motel when the gun blast went off. He
had to be restrained by others — including Young, Jesse Jackson and Hosea Williams — when he saw
Martin lying mortally wounded.

After Martin’s death, A.D. moved back to Atlanta to co-pastor Ebenezer. Books have chronicled
his drinking.

“Of course he was depressed. The whole world was depressed,” Alveda King said. “But he was still
functional. ... He just never got over that, because he was killed too soon.”

Mystery

Although the death was ruled accidental, this is what the family believes: that A.D., like
Martin, was murdered.

Naomi King was vacationing in Jamaica on the day when son Derek found his father at the bottom
of the pool in his underwear. A.D. was 38.

“Daddy was killed and put in the pool,” said Alveda. “When they pulled the body out, they began
to pump his chest, but no water came out. One of the emergency people said he was dead when he hit
the water.”

Naomi agrees. “He was an excellent swimmer. There was no water in his lungs. He was in the fetal
position. He had a bruised forehead. Rings around his neck. And he was in his underwear. He was
murdered.”

But Young suspects something else. “I think he had a heart attack in the swimming pool. He was
swimming at night by himself. There was never any evidence of foul play.”

Young points out that after A.D. King’s death, two of his children, Esther and Alfred, died
young of heart attacks. A third child, Vernon, died in 2009 at the age of 49 of a heart attack.

“Losing my husband was one degree of sadness,” said Naomi King, now 82. “But losing three
children was even more heartbreaking. You never get over it.”

She is now working to tell her husband’s story. She has created the A.D. King Foundation to
promote nonviolent conflict resolution. In 2009, they produced the documentary
A.D. King: Brother to the Dreamer.

“My beloved husband was always in the background,” Naomi King said. “But I want his memory to
live on.”